Summer Hackathon – Solve Tomorrow’s Customer Needs

At Adevinta, we truly value innovation and experimenting bravely is one of our key behaviours. In order to foster innovation, Adevinta Teams arrange various activities internally to bring new features to their customers. 

Earlier this month, one of our Global P&T Teams - MaSC (Marketing, Sales and Customer Success) held their 4th internal hackathon since 2019. After having the last 2 hackathons remotely, the teams were thrilled to be back in the office, to innovate together and just have a lot of fun doing it! The hackathon theme was inspired by a bigger vision: ‘Solve Tomorrow’s Customer Needs’ where the teams needed to showcase how they are able to understand the ever-evolving stakeholder/customer journey and  provide effective solutions on improving it and making it even more seamless. 

The hackathon started with an opening ceremony where the teams introduced themselves and pitched their ideas. Post this, the teams focused on working on transforming their ideas into functional solutions. There were also various activities and social media challenges which took place alongside the hackathon. 

After 2.5 days of hacking, 8 hackathon teams from Amsterdam and Cambodia presented their solutions to the jury members who evaluated all solutions based on the different categories: impact, customer centricity, readiness, innovation and presentation. While the teams focused on the customer journey and key metrics to explain the impact of their solution, they also went one step further by creating exciting video content to win some extra brownie points.  

Extremely impressed by the incredible presentations, the jury members decided to announce 2 winning ideas this year:

• Global Case Escalator: Brought by “Team Clickless” - The solution targets customer support agents in our marketplaces, helping to reduce the number of interactions to escalate cases to the right team from 15 clicks to just 2. With this change, the escalations can be much faster internally, which in turn can positively impact the end customers who benefit from faster services when speaking to customer care services. 
• Fraud Score & Customer Verification: Brought by Team “Keep your MaSC on, we know who you are”: The solution targets stopping fraudulent accounts at sign-up which leads to bad debt and high operational costs. During the demo, the team explained in detail how their solution can help to improve the processes and reduce the number of fraudulent events supported by technology. This implementation will also be the first step towards unlocking more improvements on automating payments and making our seller portals openly available to customers.

Other ideas covered many different areas, such as personalised recommendations, how to get important customer feedback regularly and acting on them in a timely manner. Even though the winning trophy was shared by 2 teams, all the teams created valuable solutions which we are looking forward to deploying for our colleagues and customers to use. 

At the end of the hackathon, all the team members got together to celebrate!